The Strange and Unexpected Life of Robert Fischer, DVM
by SolarCat
Summary: Following the death of his father, energy tycoon Maurice Fischer, in 2010, Fischer dismantled his inherited empire and entered the veterinary medicine program at Cornell University. [Fischer/OFC/OMC but mostly gen, originally published 8/19/10.]


___**Billionaire Robert Fischer Opens Free Vet Clinic**_

The article runs on the third page of the local section of the _LA Times_ , and none of them would have noticed it if Arthur didn't have a habit of setting up Google Alerts to track their more memorable clients - and marks. Dr. Robert Fischer, D.V.M., is quoted only once in the three paragraph article.

 _Following the death of his father, energy tycoon Maurice Fischer, in 2010, Fischer dismantled his inherited empire and entered the veterinary medicine program at Cornell University. When asked why, Fischer responded, "I felt I needed to make a drastic change in my life. My father's death was a wake-up call for me in many ways, and this has always been my dream. I finally decided to follow it." The Fischer Animal Clinic will offer free and reduced-cost veterinary services for low-income residents of the Los Angeles area._

Arthur forwards the link to the team; two emails bounce back from nonexistent accounts, closed for who-knows-how-long, and Ariadne thinks it's sweet. Arthur removes his Alert for mentions of Robert Fischer.

Of course, the article doesn't tell the whole story. The whole story is much longer, and more complex, and more deeply personal. Robert Fischer doesn't often tell the whole story.

The funeral of Maurice Fischer is well-attended, which means that most of his business associates - _people he screwed over_ , Robert thinks, uncharitably though it's somewhat accurate - have sent their condolences in the form of cards lettered by steady-handed assistants and the occasional expensive-but-tasteful flower arrangement, likely organized by the same assistants.

The people who are there in person are the are the higher-ups of the various subsidiaries of Fischer Morrow, with their surgically-enhanced wives on their arms and their neatly pressed children in tow. Robert is introduced to every twenty-something daughter of every President and Vice-President, everyone with little three-letter signifiers at the ends of their names saying, _I am important; notice me!_ -CFOs and COOs whose names Robert recalls vaguely from rare meetings or less-rare quarterly reports. Their daughters could all be related, they look so much the same. All as surgically enhanced as their mothers, and all more interested in Fischer than in Robert.

An assistant wrote his father's eulogy for him. He doesn't have time to re-write it between getting off the plane and standing up before the church full of appropriately sad 'mourners'. Maurice Fischer was not hated, but he was certainly not beloved by many. The assistant's words feel wrong now; have felt wrong since he woke up in his seat to hear that they were already descending in Los Angeles. He was not as close to his father as he wishes he had been, but the old man deserves better than these cold words.

Robert is not one of the pall bearers. He walks behind the casket and watches them load it into the hearse, and resolves that he will write something in his own words, and speak it with his own voice. He will become his own man, and he will write his father a true eulogy then.

Uncle Peter thinks he's insane, and maybe he's right. It doesn't make sense to split up his father's company, to sell off the pieces of an empire it took a lifetime of constant effort to build. His father sacrificed everything - his time, his energy, his family - and Fischer Morrow is the result of that sacrifice. The largest energy conglomerate in the world, with trillions of dollars in holdings and operations on every continent. The lights at the South Pole stay on thanks to Fischer Morrow.

Robert has sacrificed his life to become Maurice Fischer, but he is not Maurice Fischer and he will never be. He doesn't _want_ to be; a thought so freeing that Robert throws away his anti-depressants and flushes his sleeping pills the day he signs the first purchase agreement.

He bows as he has learned to, but when he straightens his spine, Saito offers a firm handshake and wishes him well. His father's greatest competitor leaped at the chance to buy out the majority of Fischer Morrow's stake in the Asian market, but Robert had not expected him to be so gracious. He's gratified by it. Saito is a shrewd businessman, and he has agreed to guarantee the jobs of Fischer Morrow's current employees (barring any such factors as incompetence or breach of company security, of course) for at least three years following the purchase. Maurice Fischer's legacy is in capable hands.

Similar agreements are made across the globe, and on the anniversary of his father's death, Robert Fischer signs away the last piece of the now-defunct Fischer Morrow. The company was never public. There are no shareholders to pay, and Uncle Peter managed to negotiate almost all of Fischer Morrow's debt onto its new owners.

Robert Fischer is a very rich man.

He sells the house in Moscow, which he hates, and spends six months in the house in Dubai, which he loves. He buys a horse, then buys a horse farm so he has somewhere to keep it. He sells his private jet, and buys a newer one. He buys a dog, a black-and-white Newfoundland he names Charles for no reason other than that it seems like the right name. He buys a pair of jeans for the first time since he was an undergraduate. He wears them until they wear out, then buys more. He throws sticks for Charles to chase into the surf on the beaches of a dozen countries, and thinks about what to do with the next sixty-or-more years of his life.

Charles is stung by a jellyfish in Spain. Robert sits in the veterinarian's waiting room, scratching Charles' ears to distract him from the pain in his leg, and maybe it's the smell of the place or something indefinable, but he remembers doing a report, in the third or fourth grade - before his mother got sick - on what he'd like to do when he grew up.

His father always said he would grow up to run _the business_ , but Robert didn't even know what _the business_ was. His mother gave him a glass of milk and some Oreos and asked him what he wanted to do, what he would like to do if he could do anything.

His mother loved animals. She had three cats, and Robert went with her to take them for their check-ups and for medicine if they were sick. They weren't so rich back then, but he thinks in retrospect that his mother would have taken them herself even if there were legions of servants and assistants to do it for her. He had said then, as Coco rubbed against his ankle and his Oreo broke off and sank to the bottom of the glass, that he thought he would be a vet, and his mother smiled and told him, "Well why don't you write about that, then?" He had, and he'd earned a 100 and a gold star. His mother stuck it on the refrigerator door, but it disappeared after his father came home from his business trip.

Charles's sting is treated, and they fly to New York. Two weeks later he sends in his application for Columbia's post-baccalaureate program, and two weeks after that he gets a personal call from the Dean, welcoming him. The Dean's wife wrote a book about energy politics in the Middle East. Robert isn't surprised by the call, but he thinks that when he finishes his classes, he'll buy them a new lab or library or something. It seems polite.

New York is beautiful in the Fall. There's something about the crispness of the air that Robert hasn't found replicated in any other city he's ever visited, and he's visited many, many cities. He talks to Uncle Peter once a week, tells him a story about Charles and a little boy and a hot dog cart in Central Park, and Uncle Peter says, "It's good to hear you laugh again, Robert."

Robert Fischer lives in a palatial penthouse with stunning views of the city and the Hudson and the bay. He shares it with Charles, who has appropriated the Italian leather sofa as his personal property. They have a housekeeper named Annamaria who teaches him to make tamales and who never touches the controlled chaos of the huge dining room table that once held dinner parties, and now holds Organic Chemistry textbooks and notebooks full of Roberts scrawling handwriting. He prefers handwritten notes, though he faithfully transcribes them onto his laptop at regular intervals.

He is perhaps the oldest person in most of his classes, excepting the professors, but not so old that he doesn't blend in. Or rather, not so old that he doesn't blend in, once he's exchanged his thousand-dollar loafers for something a little less shiny and the last of his suits for jeans and a mix of t-shirts and overpriced hooded sweatshirts that say "COLUMBIA" on them in ostentatious letters. His father would remark his appearance as slovenly at best, and those surgery-perfect twenty-something daughters would be appalled. He buys a knit hat for the winter that his father would hate instantly, and he tugs it down over his ears every time he ventures outside to attend his classes or to take Charles to the park.

Robert Fischer feels nothing at all like Robert Fischer, and he's enjoying it immensely.

Robert owns, at last count, eighty-four cars, twelve limousines, five motorcycles and one private jet. He also owns a battered Metro Card that sees more use than any of them.

He's always been smart, and with little else to occupy his time Robert finishes his prerequisite courses with a perfect GPA. His test scores are equally impressive.

Cornell welcomes him with open arms, and Robert and Charles move to Ithaca. The Italian leather sofa moves with them; Annamaria does not.

It occurs to Robert on the first day of Orientation, as he watches his new classmates mingle and fill tiny paper plates with toothpicked cubes of cheese, that he doesn't actually have any friends, if Charles and Annamaria and Uncle Peter don't count. He assumes that they don't.

He used to be good at this once, before his world became reduced to an endless series of boardrooms and business get-togethers that bore a surface resemblance to parties with associates who bore a surface resemblance to people.

Robert takes a small paper plate and fills it with toothpicked cubes of cheese. He smiles at a nearby knot of his fellow Orient-ees. A few of them smile in return, and the nearest says, "Hi! I'm Danielle!" and shakes his non-cheese hand.

"Rob Fischer," he says, and by the time the Orientation facilitators gather them for their tour of the various labs and classroom buildings, he is no longer friendless.

His new friends call him Rob, he tells Charles as they take their evening walk. He has bought a house near campus; it's beautiful, but Robert misses the liveliness of the city almost as much as he misses Annamaria's cooking.

On the weekends he goes out with Danielle and Lindsay and Mark and Sarah and Sarah's boyfriend Josh who's working on his Master's. There are bars and restaurants and movies to see and concerts to attend, and Robert feels like he's finally living, maybe for the first time since his father sent him away to boarding school at the age of eleven.

Just before finals they have a pre-celebratory bar crawl. Robert holds his liquor well, but by the third bar he's had enough that kissing Sarah seems like a brilliant idea.

Josh pulls him off and they take him home, and the three of them fuck on his extravagantly large bed with its extravagantly expensive sheets. Robert wakes up in the morning with a headache, the sheets tangled around his feet and Josh tangled around his middle and Sarah sitting on the edge of the bed in just her panties, scratching Charles' ears.

She says, "Good morning, I found the aspirin in your bathroom," and "I didn't know you had a dog. What's his name?"

And Robert says, "Thank you," and "His name is Charles," and Josh snores into his ribs.

Their finals go well, and Robert and Charles fly to Paris for Christmas because Paris is beautiful in winter and everyone else has family to see. Uncle Peter meets him at one of their favorite restaurants just before New Year's and stays for a long lunch before flying off to Tokyo. Robert takes Charles for a walk along the Seine and considers next year just buying a tree for the living room of his house in Ithaca. He has never bought a tree before, but it can't be too difficult.

He and Charles fly out the next day and spend the rest of their vacation at the house in Dubai. He loves the house in Dubai.

Lindsay claims everlasting jealousy when he returns with a tan: her family is from Montana, and she's paying for school with loans. He hasn't told them exactly how rich he is, and he doesn't really want them to know. He thinks it will change things. But maybe after they graduate, he'll take them all to Dubai for a while. Lindsay would love Dubai.

Sarah and Josh are pleased to discover that the tan is all-over.

Veterinary school is time-consuming and difficult, but Robert loves it. Or maybe that's why he loves it; he hasn't quite figured that part out yet. His grades aren't perfect, but he's on track to graduate as one of the top in his class.

Sometimes, he looks at the picture on his bookshelf, of himself and his father and the pinwheel they'd made together, and he thinks _I'm almost ready, I'm almost there_. He doesn't quite know what he's striving for, but he thinks he'll know when he reaches it.

He takes them all to Dubai after they graduate.

Lindsay loves it. Danielle punches him, because he still owes her five bucks for pizza that one time.

In Dubai, he tells them about his idea. By the time they land in New York, he has three new employees.

Lindsay has a large animal specialty, and a long-distance boyfriend in Montana who's looking to start his own stable once they've saved enough money. Robert thinks about Lindsay's loans, and the muffins she baked for their study group, and how he can count his friends on his fingers and have digits to spare. It bothers him, that he can't do more without offering them money outright - which would be rude, if well-meant. Then he remembers that once upon a time, he bought a horse.

The Fischer Animal Clinic is a brand-new building where a falling-down old building used to be. It boasts two full-time vets and two who work half-time there and half-time at their own small practice in Glendale.

The second week they're open, a homeless man walks through the door with his dog on his heels. Her name is Princess and she has a gash across her nose and a bite on her foreleg. A rat, he tells them, that she had cornered and gotten too close to.

"I like your hat," Robert tells the man as he wraps Princess's leg with a clean bandage. The man touches his knit cap self-consciously, but Robert smiles at him and eventually he smiles back.

On the tenth anniversary of Maurice Fisher's death, Robert visits his grave. He brings fresh flowers that add a touch of brightness to the dreary cemetery. It's always dreary, even under the heat of the California sun.

"I don't know if you'd be proud of me," Robert tells his father, "But I'm happy. And I know you would have wanted that."

Doctor Rob Fischer walks away from his father's grave, and goes home to his family.


End file.
